Eh, I'm 32 now, and I'd take being 32 on 2022 over being 32 in 1982 pretty much hands down, on at least 9 things out of 10... Yeah, not everything is perfect but I'd say it's for sure better than it was, and is definitely what I'd consider the best time to live in compared to those in the past.

India can be wild. I have to travel a good bit for work, and never in my life have I seen somewhere else that is such a juxtaposition of extraordinary wealth, modernity, and opulence all right alongside equally extreme poverty, squalor, and dark age bullshit.

Sure, but it's significantly more beneficial to tellbyourself that you are than it is to tell yourself that you aren't if you want to have a chance.

See you're familiar with the industry! Ha... Yeah I'm in software sales now. Still do some work in finance too as a side gig, consulting helping startups find VC funding, and wouldn't mind eventually taking that to full time. But yeah, jumped careers to software sales. Corporate financial analytics software specifically.

Big time. From age like 11 or 12 onward I wanted to work on wallstreet. Grew up broke and always thought that was how you made a lot of money, and it always looked great in movies and TV... Busted my ass in high school, busted my ass double majoring while working almost full time in college, busted my ass interning, etc... Then get there and find myself working 100+ hour weeks in a job with perpetual stress, where people are cut for quota each quarter and even of those who make quota the bottom 10% are cut at the end of each year... Did it for 2 years before admitting to myself that what I'd wanted and spent time working toward for over a decade wasn't actually what I wanted...

Conveniently though, most of the work I did towards that also ended up working towards what I do now, which I really like doing... So if you do a lot of work towards a goal then end up realizing it isn't for you, that work definitely isn't necessarily all for nothing.

I've got a decent handful of international clients and I speak German and understand Spanish. I swear I've got more than one German client who is genuinely significantly friendlier and more agreeable when speaking in English than when speaking in German. Then I've got one Spanish client who seems to be a lot more direct when speaking in Spanish than in English... Add in cultural differences and it's a miracle the global economy functions as smoothly as it does.

At my old company our territories used to be really broad, but we finally had to tighten them up because of how different sales executives pitches had to be even between neighboring countries, where if you aren't used to dealing with them specifically you can be next to useless. Like, I had eastern Asia as one of my territories when I first started at my old company. Had always prided myself on being able to overcome any objection, and was in a meeting where one of the guys was trying to take 1 more week to talk more to our competitor even though his team wanted to move forward. That's a problem I've dealt with 100 times, no big deal, so I ask why he needs to work with them more first when we are beating them on every box. His response is "because I said I would give them a strong chance, so to stop now would dishonor the spirit of my ancestors." At which point my only option is to go get sushi because I got nothing for objections regarding the honor of one's ancestral spirits.

I definitely don't think either is true across the board for everyone. But, yeah, historically I've always been extremely hard on myself and things have worked out as good as I could have asked them to

My dad drank himself to death when I was 13 and my mom used to sell food stamps for painkillers and booze money, and left me couch surfing for a month when I was 10 when she ran off with some dude after Woodstock 99. Don't think I was all that lucky on the parent front ha.

Yeah, it's genuinely blowing my mind that people seem to think "don't do anything very stressful" is good advice.

And usually causes even more mental health problems down the road.

I used to work 90-100+ hour weeks, currently work ~70 hour weeks, have to spend 100+ nights a year in hotels for work, have a super high pressure job where a quarterly quota is hanging over your head and the bottom 10-15% of performers who do make quota still end up being cut each year end, my pay is 70% commission and bonus so I never know how much I'm making next month until I make it despite having a truckload of costs, and now we have triplets on the way... Pretty sure I'm extremely familiar with extreme stress. If that stress is a trade for my family's financial security, my family's stability, my kids' educations, my kids' opportunities, etc. then I am more than happy to go through a boatload of stress for that.

Strongly disagree on that one. There are plenty of things worth sacrificing some of your mental health for.

What if you're in a catch 22 where you're both killing it and having a rough time, and removing one removes the other too?

Eh, the entertainment industry can be pretty intense work. I used to have 90-100 hour weeks working in finance, and knew a couple and distinctly remember a couple people who worked in the TV and movie industries who had schedules/days that made me feel good about mine

Pretty sure that humans needing food and shelter to live predates capitalism by a solid few hundred thousand years.

Dude, you told him he could trust you, then told the whole internet. Not cool.

I have to take something like 100 flights a year for work if you count small connection flights. There was a while in there where I perpetually had to leave a day early so that if the flight got canceled you'd have time to wait and catch another flight.

If you covered up the head I could believe it was my coworkers wife

I'm not really sure that that would have been true in that time period. It's not like people were buying iPhones and gadgets, and it's not like laborers were buying gold jewelry, and carriages, and books, etc... They would have pretty much just been buying food and shelter, which were still necessary for slaves.

They don't have to be though

Only way things can get better is if you keep trying. There are plenty of people who are in fantasies spots today, who are only there because they kept trying when they were in that same position.

Kind of makes getting to know someone impossible though. It doesn't mean you necessarily like them, just that you haven't had a chance to realize that you don't.

I'm perpetually painfully busy. Like ~70 hours a week in the office, 100 nights a year in hotels, consulting gig on the side, and a good many other responsibilities... Used to pretty much need to eat TUMS like candy because of the stress... Then, covid hit, dinner and drinks with clients wasn't a thing anymore, and suddenly those 100 nights a year in hotels started being filled with getting high and ordering room service on the company card while watching Family Guy and South Park, one of which is pretty much always on. I sweat that legitimately took the stress down from like a 9.5 to a 5, even on days where I'm not doing it... Sucks, it's still illegal in my home state. Legal in almost all my clients' states though, so I can only smoke when I'm not in the safety of my own home, doing something work related no less. Once/if it becomes legal here I can probably get that 5 down to like a 2.

Did you just have to decide you wanted less? Find a way to do the same amount in less time?... I'm definitely the overwork type, usually in the office 60-80 hours a week with a lot of side obligations. But my wife is pregnant with triplets and I don't want to be one of those dads who's never home. However, the kids on the way also means we're about to need more money, not less, so I genuinely have zero idea how to rein it in.

Eh, that can still be good on the whole depending on how bad that 80% is vs how good the other 20% is... Like 80% of mine definitely aren't great days. 5 days a week I'm out the door for the gym at 4:45, in the office from 7am to 7 or 8 pm, and sometimes not home until after 10. Which, yeah, definitely sucks. But the tradeoff of that 80% kind of sucking is that the other 20% is fantastic, and I definitely wouldn't say I have a bad life on the whole...

Like if 1 is as bad as it gets, 5 is perfectly average, and 10 is as good as if gets. Them 8 days of 4.5 and 2 days of 9s or 10s still averages good.